Justin Hurwitz Gives Everything to His Movie Scores, and He’s Not Going to Stop

I was going to ask if it’s gotten easier over the course of the films you’ve made, but it sounds like not at all.

I’ve never worked harder than on Babylon.

Is it the scale of it?

The scale of it, the amount of music, this the most complicated music I’ve ever put together. I just got like deeper also into the production of the music. We were in the studio every night until midnight laying down like 40 saxophone solos and version after version after version version of the drums. I’ve just never been so detail oriented. I went down, I would say, a music production rabbit hole that I’ve never gone down before. 

Can you tell me about that bass sax, or tenor sax, that dominates so much of the score?

Oh, like this? [Hurwitz leans over to plink out one of Babylon’s main themes on the piano right next to him] That’s a baritone sax. We had bass, tenor, alto, all that other stuff in the movie. Yeah. But when it’s that lead melodic instrument, that’s a baritone sax. I can tell you the whole story. I remote recorded him from his bedroom in Philadelphia.

One of the early ideas Damien I had was like, like kind of the feeling of modern dance music, but using instruments that would be appropriate for the time. So I went Googling “dance music on a saxophone” and found this guy, Leo Pellegrino. He’s got this band Too Many Zooz, and that’s what he does, he plays dance music on a sax. The second I saw him, I’m like, that is exactly what we need. Leo’s in Philadelphia and he tours a lot and he’s busy and it was hard to get him to LA. So I took what we could get, which is him in his bedroom on a bedroom mic. But it’s the playing and the personality and the style that matters. 

Once I started listening to more of his music, I saw he has all these cool extended techniques, these sort of screams and squeals and squawks. And I started incorporating those sounds into a score. So like in the title card cue, it’s called “Babylon,” on the soundtrack right before the big hit, there’s this sound—that’s Leo doing one of these signature sounds that only he has. 

In that end montage, you have the music crashing on top of each other. How do you keep it from sounding like noise? Or is it supposed to sound like noise? 

It’s definitely cacophonous on purpose. It’s kind of a wall, it’s kind of an assault. But we bring back every single melody in the movie in a somewhat thoughtful way, where they would each pop up and have their moment. There would be certain conflicts, but they would each sort of get to come pop up. 

We had our two incredible drummers from the movie, Peter Erskine and Gary Novak, who are two of the best drummers in the world, just going absolutely crazy, panned on different sides. So you have Gary off on the right, you have Peter off on the left, and again, helping shape these solos in the studio, letting them pretty much go wild with a little bit of shaping.